[HN Gopher] Look How Big Is My Team
___________________________________________________________________
Look How Big Is My Team
Author : nbstme
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-01-07 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nicolasbustamante.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nicolasbustamante.substack.com)
| _448 wrote:
| This one size fits all approach is wrong. It is not about the
| size, but of quality. If you are able to hire all A-star
| employees then small size makes sense. But the reality is very
| different. You cannot get all A-star employees from the start,
| and you are also racing against time. So you try to balance
| between time, size and quality. If you are lucky, you will get
| second A-star senior engineer. Otherwise you have to hire two
| junior A-star engineers instead of one senior engineer both being
| mentored by a senior engineer.
|
| Depending on what your team configuration is, the way of
| communication changes. With senior engineers the communication is
| minimal but with junior team member configuration the
| communication increases. Similarly, the cost structure(implicit
| and explicit) also differs between these two configuration.
|
| So suggesting a single prescription is not viable. The reality is
| very different and needs to be looked at on a case by case basis.
| ziggus wrote:
| Shouldn't the calculation of the 'value' of the average employee
| be the annual profit divided by the number of employees, not
| revenue?
| pjc50 wrote:
| "average revenue per employee" is a fairly widely used metric
| even in non-startup companies. "Profit", GAAP or non-GAAP, is
| these days kind of a virtual number; Amazon have been hugely
| successful despite not "making a profit" in the traditional
| accounting sense.
|
| However the article hints at what's really going on: in many
| startups the objective is to cash out before the question of
| profit has to be addressed. Many of these buyouts are
| "acquishutdowns" - the _product_ has zero value and is shut
| down after a short transition, while the customers and staff
| are really what 's being bought. In this sense the startup
| functions like an expensive recruitment agency or an
| inefficient version of the footballer transfer scheme.
|
| In those cases it's advantageous to hire even if there is
| nothing profitable for the employees to do - because it
| increases the buyout value.
| nbstme wrote:
| You're right; all these metrics can be easily manipulated,
| whereas revenue is more reliable.
|
| I guess you're talking about "acqui-hire," meaning the
| acquisition of teams of 10-40 people for ~$25m. My broader
| point is that many startups scale to hundreds of employees,
| buying growth, but remain poor businesses. Headcount is a
| vanity metric similar to likes on social media or
| fundraising.
| m_ke wrote:
| Growing a sales and marketing team can translate to a lot
| of revenue growth.
| nbstme wrote:
| Yes, and as long that the revenue growth is higher than
| the cost, most startups should do it!
| seibelj wrote:
| Also good to see if revenue can increase while adding few or no
| employees. Then the potential for flywheel is there, vs. an
| agency that scales costs linearly with revenue.
| nbstme wrote:
| True! Some startups, unfortunately, have a scalability
| problem and need to scale headcount to increase the revenue
| proportionally.
| nbstme wrote:
| Yes, it's another interesting metric. Although ideally, a fast-
| growing focuses on cash flows and reinvest all the cash so that
| there are no profits at the end of the year.
| andruby wrote:
| When looking at revenue / employee, in businesses where wages
| are the biggest cost (eg: software), that ratio also gives you
| a upper bound to how much you can pay employees and still be
| profitable.
|
| In my book, revenue / employee is much more meaningful than
| profit / employee, because profit is arbitrary to a large
| extent.
| nbstme wrote:
| +1 and I should have mentioned that there are significant
| disparities, say per country, of how much an employee costs.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| Vanity metrics don't have to be high numbers, they can be low
| numbers too. The author is just swapping high head count with low
| head count as a vanity metric, using low headcount as an
| efficiency indicator. Without knowing what the people are working
| on/achieving, headcount is useless either way.
| bckr wrote:
| > The author is just swapping high head count with low head
| count
|
| That's actually not the conclusion. They suggest looking at
| ARR/FTE.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| To show my point with an example, according to him, 10 devs
| keeping the lights on has a better AAR than 15 devs that are
| keeping the lights on _and_ adding new value. But the former
| is not more efficient than the latter.
| mavelikara wrote:
| What is AAR?
| nsp wrote:
| Pretty sure they mean annual recurring revenue (ARR)
| jstummbillig wrote:
| All else being equal, low head count is simply better than high
| head count from a business standpoint.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| Sure, I guess my point is that all else is never equal.
| tyingq wrote:
| This phenomenon is more interesting to watch in a big IT
| department. Where various leaders try to get allocated more
| people, or slide in new management layers. I suppose the tendency
| to empire build is baked into us.
|
| I'm also surprised at how little uniformity there is across
| companies. You would imagine sizes of teams would follow some
| ratio related to revenue, or percentage of all IT, etc. They
| don't. So the size of the IT Security Team, or Change Management,
| etc, vary wildly. Even for similar companies in the same
| industry.
| bitwize wrote:
| HM: "We're definitely in startup mode, we've got a team of 400
| employees, 150 of those in engineering..."
|
| Me: (Cloud Strife voice) Not interested.
|
| Based on a true story.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| My worst job ever was at a big company whose CEO believed that
| small teams and low headcount were the answer to everything. I
| was attracted to the company because I had enjoyed working in
| small teams at startups before.
|
| It was awful in a big company, though. We were always short-
| staffed on everything we did. The CEO chronically underestimated
| how much work went into maintaining existing products or even
| just extending them. He wanted to treat every new initiative like
| a mini-startup that could move fast with small headcount, which
| led to tens of isolated teams building products that were
| incompatible with each other and not communicating about it.
| Coordinating with other teams would slow you down, so it was
| basically forbidden. But then our customers expected things to
| work together, so we had to scramble to re-integrate everything
| before it shipped.
|
| Taking vacation was difficult because it could mean 20% of the
| team was gone, which would have measurable effects on delivery.
| Every time someone left it was a scramble to re-hire and re-train
| because it left such a huge hole in the team.
|
| Hiring too many people is a problem, but trying to keep teams
| artificially small is also a problem. The hard part is knowing
| how close you are to "too big" or "too small", which is rarely
| obvious at the time.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Well, to be clear, it was great for the CEO
| Andys wrote:
| Heh, I used to have so many opinions on how to run software
| companies. Ideal team sizes, methodologies, remote vs office.
|
| Now I'm seasoned with enough experience to know that no matter
| what the "best practice", some companies out there will screw
| it up.
|
| Whatever past successes I experienced in teams I was a part of,
| I was wrongly attributing to these various rules of thumb (such
| as team size).
| nbstme wrote:
| Thanks for your insightful comments. You're right; the hardest
| part is to find the balance between too big and too small
| headcount. It's challenging and it differs a lot per
| department, company size etc
| jhund wrote:
| Team Topologies provides some good info around team size, and
| how to split teams when they get too large:
| https://teamtopologies.com/
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| > treat every new initiative like a mini-startup
|
| > Coordinating with other teams would slow you down, so it was
| basically forbidden.
|
| Are you sure team size was actually a factor? I've seen
| rules/cultures like these before and they always end in
| disaster, regardless of team size.
|
| Small teams that actually coordinate, on the other hand, seem
| to do just fine in my experience. In fact, one of the biggest
| problems with oversized teams is the combinatorial explosion of
| communication channels https://project-management.info/number-
| of-communication-chan...
| [deleted]
| pkrotich wrote:
| I remember the need to make company sites look big / corporate
| like - using We even when it's I. It's less of a concern now, BUT
| headcount is still important because of bus count/factor [0] -
| which is a legitimate concern if a business unit is going to
| depend on your solution for business continuity.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
| nbstme wrote:
| I remember being turned down by customers because your team of
| 5 people was too small. Now that we are 80+ I understand their
| concerns and how hard it is to rely on a small team's software.
| rurp wrote:
| I wonder how much infrastructure affects these calculations. In
| theory a company built on serverless resources should have much
| better revenue/employee, since a key premise of serverless is to
| replace headcount with a higher cloud bill. A saas company using
| expensive cloud services might look artificially more successful
| than one built with on-prem or more traditional cloud servers, if
| investors focus too much on employee specific costs.
| jupp0r wrote:
| One thing completely left out of the discussion is the aspect of
| time. It takes lots of work and time to hire somebody and make
| them perform at their best at contributing to the business
| (especially in technical roles). I've seen this underestimated
| more times that I can count. Throwing new (either to the company
| or to the problem) people at a problem will almost never speed up
| a project. Hiring done right is an investment - not only of time,
| but also of short term productivity - that will start paying off
| after months at best. People react taken aback when they offer
| you 3 engineers to get that project done in 4 months instead of 5
| and you tell them that this will not make this project run better
| but will help with the next.
| jitl wrote:
| > Small teams leverage speed as a competitive advantage which is
| key to winning over competitors. Other benefits include better
| communication, more engagement, more profits to reinvest, and,
| overall, better productivity. Small groups avoid the Ringelmann
| effect, which is the tendency for individuals to become
| increasingly less productive as the size of their group
| increases. More importantly, the headcount constraint drives
| creativity and innovative solutions.
|
| > Controlling headcount expansion when experiencing fast growth
| is challenging. Targeting an efficient number of teammates is
| tricky because it's difficult to know and test when fewer people
| can achieve more.
|
| This is really challenging, but one thing to keep in mind when
| planning headcount is that product usage and business revenue can
| scale very, very quickly once you find product-market fit, but
| there's a slow maximum rate you can find, hire, and onboard more
| (good) people; especially good managers.
|
| At Notion we were too cautious about adding engineers because we
| over-valued the efficiency of the small team, and under-estimated
| the difficulty/low rate of growing the team. This caught us by
| surprise - we thought we had a good trajectory figured out
| compared with our business growth, but at a certain point the
| growth ate through the headroom in our systems, and we spent most
| of a year on reliability instead of features. We fixed the
| problems, and have been hiring aggressively since that whiplash,
| but it still feels like we lost a lot of time chasing efficiency
| instead of starting hyper growth hiring.
|
| That said, hindsight is 20/20. If you start aggressive hiring as
| soon as you see some market fit, and then growth tapers off, you
| can burn both your efficiency and runway on a "false start". But
| even if you're right to start, you're going to hit the "good
| problems" of hyper growth next. Maybe it's part of the hyper
| growth territory to feel a year behind hiring until suddenly you
| double the team in a year from 300 to 600 engineers like we did
| at Airbnb and then all the culture falls apart and suddenly
| you're in the Warring States period.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Might signal efficiency.
|
| Might signal unsustainable overwork, inability to scale / manage
| a "real" business / no real barrier to entry.
| nbstme wrote:
| Don't you think the inability to scale is exemplified by
| revenue growth problems, not headcount?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Of course it reeeallly depends on the case, but every
| business will need the "wetworks": customer service, client
| relationships, etc.
|
| So if you have a core tech product and that is scaling, then
| fantastic.
|
| The classic success case was WhatsApp: 19 billion dollars
| (jeesus wow) for a basement full of people.
| m_ke wrote:
| VCs buy growth, headcount signals growth
| tootie wrote:
| It's not just VCs. In a big corporation, the number of reports
| in your org is proxy to your clout. The more people you manage
| the more prestige you have. My wife likes to say "Head count is
| currency". It can absolutely lead to bloat because leaders are
| now incentivized to have more employees instead of producing
| more value.
| nbstme wrote:
| Not sure that signaling & social status lead however to success
| m_ke wrote:
| If your goal is to maximize the rate of return you pump a lot
| of cash into a startup, force them to spend it on heads and
| marketing then ask your friend to 10x the valuation in 12
| months.
| nbstme wrote:
| Haha true! Although it's the "not realized rate of return."
| That might be good enough to raise another fund and live
| out of generous management fees, but it is not sufficient
| to realize financial performance - making money when the
| business sells out or IPO.
| m_ke wrote:
| Public markets have the same incentives, as long as
| there's growth stonks go up. Late stage firms have
| relationships with banks and the return of SPACs made
| dumping roided up donkeys easier than ever.
| nbstme wrote:
| Warren Buffet claims that his mentor Benjamin Graham once
| wrote: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine,
| but in the long run, it is a weighing machine" In the
| long run, fundamentals matter, and only the best business
| thrives.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yes but VC funds have a fixed window, their goal is to
| deploy their money in the first 3-5 years and show
| returns in under 10.
| vanusa wrote:
| If the goal is to create a successful product, then no.
|
| If the goal is to get another round of funding from, or
| bought by someone with tons of cash but lazy in the diligence
| department -- then it can definitely "work".
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Not just VCs a lot of governmental funding initiatives or tax
| initiatives are based on headcount growth. So sometimes you
| hear startup founders proudly say how they will double the
| headcount in the next year.
| paulcole wrote:
| About a decade ago I worked at a place where we frantically
| moved from our private offices to a big shared open office
| situation with whiteboards on the walls before the investors
| came because "that's how facebook does it."
|
| It worked and the place got bought out lol. Business was shit
| though.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Ours had a fancy "library", well-stocked with thought-
| provoking books, supposedly for stimulating discussion and
| study, realistically only for showing investors around.
|
| The "library" backed out onto the Big Boss' office and he
| didn't like the noise. Oh, I forget, of course he sat with us
| lowly minions at the coal face of open space, and it
| definitely wasn't his office. Except it was. And he didn't
| like the noise.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I've certainly seen first-hand how resource constraints can lead
| to incredible focus, creativity and a cohesive end product. I've
| also seen how hypergrowth at scale can lead tons of waste and
| net-negative activity. The ideal is efficient growth, which
| requires different tricks at different stages, and becomes harder
| and harder as you grow.
|
| I dislike the VC model because there is huge pressure to keep
| growing even when it doesn't make sense or sells out potentially
| bigger but non-monetary ambitions. For example Twitter received
| incredible pressure to be as big as Facebook which turned it into
| a generic walled-garden ad-selling media app, away from the
| potential to be message-plumbing for the Internet.
| nbstme wrote:
| Targeting an efficient number of teammates is tricky because
| it's difficult to know and test when fewer people can achieve
| more. Too many constraints kill growth, and not too much also
| kill growth...
|
| A fact often ignored is that big startup success didn't raise a
| lot of money. Before their IPO, Shopify raised only $122.3M,
| Google raised $36.1M, Linkedin $103M, King $43M, Datadog $147M,
| Tableau $30M, and ServiceNow $83M. They all built massive
| businesses without a lot of cash infusion.
| zebraflask wrote:
| I'm a little taken aback at 100M+ qualifying as "not a lot of
| cash" in comparison to, say, YC's usual funding level for
| brand new companies?
|
| I think it might be restating the obvious to say that a
| company pulling in 100M+ is no longer a startup, it's an
| established (even if relatively new) company in aggressive
| growth mode.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| Are you saying that raising $100M makes a company _ipso
| facto_ no longer a startup, or that some transformation
| that makes it a startup has almost always happened by then?
|
| I joined my last company about a year before they raised a
| Series C that brought total funding to $95M, and I think
| that by almost any other definition it was a startup before
| and afterwards.
|
| (And it was enough of a startup to do a "hard pivot" to
| something largely unrelated when the pandemic destroyed its
| core business model, instead of shutting down.)
| askafriend wrote:
| Competitive Senior Eng packages in this market are
| ~$350-500k (incl equity), and the fully loaded cost to hire
| is probably something closer to $1m per engineer.
|
| Yes $100M is a lot in absolute terms, but depending on what
| you're trying to achieve, how many people you need to
| achieve it, and what your timeline is, $100M might not be
| so crazy in context.
| jzoch wrote:
| look at companies like dataminr or plenty - they have taken
| over a billion dollars in funding afaik. That level of cash
| is pretty rare for successful companies from what I see.
| 100M is a lot too though - i don't disagree.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > For instance, the crypto exchange FTX with 150 employees rivals
| Coinbase and its 4115 employees.
|
| I bet Coinbase has better customer support. Customer support for
| a financial institution can be 1000+ people, which inflates
| numbers but has a huge impact on the customer.
|
| Imagine you deposit 10k and your balance isn't showing up. A
| company with 150 employees is going to try to use the same
| (potentially broken) automated systems to help you. It can be
| really comforting to know there is a human on the other end
| looking at your account and saying, "yeah that doesn't look
| right, let me fix this for you."
| tluyben2 wrote:
| > I bet Coinbase has better customer support. Customer support
| for a financial institution can be 1000+ people, which inflates
| numbers but has a huge impact on the customer.
|
| I have no experience, but whenever I read about coinbase
| support, people are crying how horrible it is. Reading only
| now, people are calling it The Worst they ever encountered.
| Anyone with experience here?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| If you look at volume Coinbase does something like 2x as much
| volume as FTX. Volume isn't the end all be all of an
| exchange, but we would expect larger exchanges with more
| trading users to have more complaints.
| waffle_maniac wrote:
| Who asks their acquaintances for revenue numbers? Most employees
| at a small startup won't know anyway.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Craigslist went from 50 employees in 2017 to 407 today, and I
| wonder if that's partly responsible for its decline. Facebook
| Marketplace was probably the last straw, but a smaller Craigslist
| might have been able to pivot and innovate ahead of them.
|
| Back in the 90s, I always wanted to be in a small startup that
| was mostly open source or maybe part of a software developer
| guild that pooled resources with other startups. Then every time
| a startup won the internet lottery, it would invest the proceeds
| into the local community or pay into UBI.
|
| But even today, there's no way to come up with the roughly
| $24,000 per year it costs to live in the rural US, so we all
| still work for the mega corps in one way or another, saving for a
| day we might free ourselves which never comes.
| nbstme wrote:
| Interesting for Craiglist! Maybe they started hiring more in
| 2017 when their traffic decreased to fund new initiatives, and
| it finally didn't work out. Or perhaps it worked out, and they
| stabilized the traffic around 300m visitors per month. Who
| knows!
|
| Don't you think there are more and more developers - for now
| the most elite ones - who manage to live out of contributions
| from grants or github sponsoring?
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya there are, but it's such a vanishingly small percentage
| that it's not material.
|
| There's good stuff like Y Combinator, and I was excited when
| it started because it seemed to grok that the fundamental
| problem in startups is that first $10,000. But (and this may
| be a controversial opinion) I feel like they fell into the
| same trap that every other incubator falls for, which is
| catering to elites. Now it seems to be a bit gamified,
| filtered through the lens of a certain youth demographic
| pitching to wealthy investors for large sums of money
| ($125,000), like the show Shark Tank.
|
| I would very much like to see something that looks more like
| the grant system you mentioned, where small amounts of money
| could be obtained with relatively few hoops or strings
| attached. I've had countless times in my life where $5,000 or
| $10,000 would have given me the runway that I needed to
| finish a project and make money. But the money never came, so
| those all ended in failure, and a person can only fail so
| many times into midlife before playing the game itself feels
| like failing. If I knew in the 90s what I know now, I maybe
| wouldn't have chosen tech as a career.
|
| The flip side is that I've survived on almost nothing for so
| many years, that I feel a calling to work towards providing
| income to everyone, everywhere. I think that's something we
| can manifest if we go back to first principles. I'd propose
| studying the history of such attempts and discovering which
| steps of the process were sabotaged by external pressures,
| then routing around that interference. Basically a startup
| working to solve the problem of income. The fact that this
| sounds at least a little preposterous seems more like of a
| failure of capitalism to me, than something fundamental.
|
| A practical attempt at this might look like building solar
| farms to power cryptocurrency mining, to route around the
| problem of energy markets not buying alternative energy from
| homeowners at the going rate. Every market has that kind of
| defect that can be exploited. But they're difficult to see
| when we're at the losing end of the bargain as consumers, or
| dependent on the cashflow they generate as employees.
|
| I might be slightly bitter after watching no movement on this
| in over 25 years, so please take what I'm saying with a grain
| of salt. I'm also super-optimistic about stuff like solarpunk
| :-)
| fragmede wrote:
| Or, maybe a bigger Craigslist would have better predicted
| Facebook marketplace's reach and have additional lines of
| business so Facebook Marketplace wouldn't be such an
| existential threat. Without additional, inside information it's
| impossible to say.
|
| Remember, Craigslist predates the cloud by a decade or so, so
| standing up their service would be a lot easier today than when
| they started. How much time of those 50 people was spent on
| procurement, to the opportunity cost of having a modern
| interface/other upgrades.
| bps4484 wrote:
| "but a smaller Craigslist might have been able to pivot and
| innovate ahead of them."
|
| I feel like they had a small team that didn't innovate for 20
| years. Whether they were 10 employees or 10,000 they were due
| to have someone figure out a better way.
| fragmede wrote:
| One of those 9,950/10,000 employees would have figured out
| that better way. Size matters when there are multiple orders
| of magnitude of difference.
| verve_rat wrote:
| Sure, one of them would have figured it out. But then they
| would spend the next year trying to get managers to listen
| and would eventually quit out of frustration.
|
| Counterfactuals are fun!
| xmprt wrote:
| Craiglist's biggest advantage in the past was their userbase.
| They didn't make the website that user friendly. I might be an
| outlier on HN but I'd rather give my number and email once to a
| large corporation instead of having to use that email/number to
| directly call strangers, asking about what they're selling.
| They also have a problem with duplicate or irrelevant listings
| when you search for low volume items.
|
| Once Facebook Marketplace came in and essentially wiped away
| all those roadblocks. Facebook has its own share of problems
| but those are mostly with the people who are still using it and
| the ads. The marketplace product works pretty well.
| phkahler wrote:
| Just be sure they're not contracting out development to
| artificially reduce the FTE count and increase this ratio.
|
| Another strange ration was a CEO at a tier 1 automotive supplier
| telling us he was looking at engineering as a percent of sales
| (or revenue or similar). We were above the industry average which
| seemed to indicate spending "too much" on engineering. My first
| thought was that a lot of engineering (vehicle specific
| calibration and software tweaking and integration) was on a per-
| vehicle basis, so that metric could be improved by not taking the
| smaller production programs. DUH. But as a leader it makes sense
| to grab all that business, including the less profitable
| projects. Maybe those are even a basket of programs with one OEM
| negotiated all at once. Who knows.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Especially if you're not capitalizing any of that spend and
| expensing it all to be conservative in your financial
| reporting.
|
| The eng spend could benefit you later down the road so it's
| perhaps naive to say it's bad to be above industry average
| devops000 wrote:
| It's a cultural legacy of the old businesses that were human
| intensive. Now there is a lot of use of technology that is harder
| to see from the outside. Clearly those who judge a technology
| startup by the number of people indicate a low understanding of
| the scaling capabilities provided by technology.
| nbstme wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm still amazed that
| Microsoft, with 144,000 employees, still has a revenue per
| employee of $932,000! What a monster business!
| opportune wrote:
| Microsoft has a lot of vendors and contractors. I'd be
| curious to see how the number changes when you include, say,
| everybody with an active @microsoft.com email.
| duped wrote:
| What you really want to look at is net income per employee,
| which for MSFT is around $415k. Compare to Amazon with is
| iirc around $50k (just goes to show why software-first
| businesses are so attractive to investors)
| opportune wrote:
| Microsoft has a lot of vendors and contractors that aren't
| technically employees but are, in an abstract sense, part
| of their workforce and payroll.
|
| Amazon also has a lot of contractors, but IIRC most of
| their warehouse employees (the vast majority by number) are
| FTE. Also I think Amazon has many multiples of Microsoft's
| "employees" as a result.
|
| For sure software has big margins but I think there is a
| lot of nuance lost when looking at these gameable FTE
| counts
| duped wrote:
| That's why you look at net income and not revenue
| efficax wrote:
| depends how much net income is being reduced by capital
| investment costs... for example amazon has been
| bootstrapping its own version of fedex. They could probably
| raise net income in the short term by just using existing
| carriers, but they clearly think long-term profits will be
| improved by burning money on rolling out an entire internal
| logistics org.
| devops000 wrote:
| You can find something similar in consulting businesses:
|
| - Mckinsey Revenue: $10.B, Employees: 30.000 -> Revenue per
| employee: $333K
|
| - Accenture Revenue: $50B, Employees: 674,000 -> Revenue per
| employee: $74K
| pc86 wrote:
| I think this just shows how underpaid so many people at
| Accenture must be. You figure out of nearly 3/4 of a
| million employees, they must have several hundred, maybe a
| thousand or more executives making $200-500k/yr in salary.
| There must be a ton of consultants doing the grunt work for
| $30-50k to make that feasible.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Given that Accenture does a ton of outsourcing, I'd
| imagine it is a magnitude less than $30-50k.
| yardie wrote:
| "There are plenty of examples in which small teams outcompete
| large teams on the same market. For instance, the crypto exchange
| FTX with 150 employees rivals Coinbase and its 4115 employees. I
| admire how small groups of people have built incredible
| businesses."
|
| Me reading that as I'm casually walking by FTX Arena, Miami right
| now.
| nbstme wrote:
| haha FTX = small team but big adversiting budget!
| physicsgraph wrote:
| The advantage to smaller teams is nimbleness; the advantage to
| larger teams is robustness to perturbations. These are not
| mutually exclusive, but in practice a small (nimble) and robust
| team is challenging to build since the balance of personalities
| and skills requires intent and access to amazing hiring
| opportunities.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| I agree with the premise of this blog post. But there are
| downsides to having a small team. We're a bootstrapped startup
| with 15 employees. When we lose an employee (sickness,
| termination, voluntary) it really hurts us. We have a 3 person
| sales team. One sales person down means a 33% loss in our
| pipeline. When our accountant is out, that's the entire
| department.
|
| 50-100 seems like the sweet spot for having enough coverage in
| responsibilities and spreading risk. But maybe we'll get there
| and it will still feel like we don't have enough people.
| nbstme wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I also suffered from this when we were less
| than 20 people. From my experience, once you reach roughly 50
| people, you have enough redundancies among functions to not be
| hurt by a departure.
| r00fus wrote:
| How do you manage a 50-100 person team?
|
| Honestly that sounds as bad as a skeleton crew of 1-3 people.
|
| The reality is that oft-hated word _bureaucracy_ is what 's
| needed. A hierarchy.
|
| Using a military analogy: "teams" of 2-3 ppl, 2 teams in a
| squad, 3-4 squads in a platoon, 3-4 platoons in a company, etc,
| etc.
|
| Each of those entities in the organization should have a lead.
| Someone who's responsible for their group's performance.
|
| Now you can stretch this, and minimize paperwork to expand say,
| a squad to 10-12 people (instead of the 7) but that either
| requires a talented squad lead, or some stuff gets ignored (ok
| for short term, not good long term).
|
| If you have large loose teams without a hierarchy it's madness
| okareaman wrote:
| > _It often leads to what I call the "hiring death cycle." A
| startup faced with a problem tends to hire more people, making it
| harder to solve the problem and thus requiring even more hires.
| The death cycle is reinforced by the "next hire fallacy," in
| which, supposedly, the next recruit will suddenly solve the
| problem. It's common to fall into this vicious cycle and hard to
| break out of it. _
|
| Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
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